Joel and Alma, Swedish Grandparents

JOEL AND ALMA,
SWEDIS
H GRANDPARENTS JOHN W. LARSON
My earliest memories of my Swedish grandparents are somewhat confused impressions of the adult merry making that always took place at their home over the Christmas and New Year holidays. We not only celebrated such occasions with Joel and Alma, who lived in a big white house on a double lot at the north end of Saint Paul, but we were there almost every weekend. Since I was not simply an only child, but also an only grandchild, I now sense that I occupied an odd yet privileged position in the adult gatherings that took place in my grandparents' home.
I joined in when the men—my grandfather Joel, a steam-fitter in the Great Northern Railroad shops at Dale Street and Minnehaha, Uncle Art, a molder by trade, and my father Walter, who was a master machinist—gathered around the furnace in the basement talking, while drinking moonshine and home brew. Such men were the rock bed of their industrial era. They enjoyed the distinctive independence, security, and satisfaction of highly skilled workers. They felt superior to the untrained and unskilled but saved their contempt for their social superiors, office workers, salesmen, and middle management. Awe and respect were reserved for the tycoons, the giants of their industrial age, men like James J. Hill and Henry Ford.
I enjoyed the masculine atmosphere in the basement, near the furnace, the coal bin, the work bench, the stored jars of tomatoes and other preserves, with the damp smell of brewer's yeast and malt, the pungent odor of Copenhagen snuff, and the talk. The men chose the larger topics for conversation, politics and the economy, or the trade unions. Their political perspective was Farmer-Labor, midwest­ern—
not revolutionary but leaning toward socialism. After 1929 their talk turned to the bad times, and after 1932 to Roosevelt, whose various programs for ending or softening the depression, the WPA, PWA, NRA, and all the rest, provided topics for endless conversation.
The men folk in my family never said how they really voted. Subject as they were to pressure from their unions, from employers, and from the more politically zealous among their friends and neighbors, they valued the protection afforded by the secret ballot. Nevertheless in 1933, when I was 10, I remember that while we walked up the long Jackson Street hill on our way home from town my father explained to me why it would be desirable for the government to own the nation's railroads and such major natural resources as coal and iron. I suspect that he voted for the socialist Norman Thomas in 1932, but I shall never know. On the other hand, what I do know is that by the time he died in 1984 he was a card carrying Reagan Republican.
My father's progression from left wing socialism in the early 1930s to right wing republicanism in the 1980s was partly the result of broader social and economic changes. It was also an expression of his upward mobility and a change in his life style. The shift became noticeable in the 1950s when the men no longer gathered in the basement to drink whiskey with one another but my father drank martinis with my mother and their friends before dinner.
During my childhood older customs prevailed. Men and women had worlds of their own. While the men gathered in the basement, upstairs in the brightly lit kitchen the women good-humoredly dismissed this "man talk" as "building the railroads." The men are in the basement "building the railroads" they would say, implying that it was gratuitous chatter without any deeper significance because, after all, the railroads had already been built. The women, my grandmother Alma, my mother Vivian, and an aunt or two, would talk about things closer to home than politics or the economy, preferably about people they knew and how they were faring.
When I got tired of the grownup talk in the basement and kitchen, I would turn to a quiet and inexhaustible alternative, my grand­mother's
rich collection of scrap and photo albums stored to the capacity of a tall oak cabinet on which stood the telephone—tele­phones
"stood" in those days. My favorites were the scrapbooks that my grandmother had pasted together while in Chicago from 1898 to 1901. In my earliest years I looked at the pictures simply for them­selves—
colorful ads of all kinds. But the most eye catching were the fashion illustrations from 1898 wherein statuesque and solid bos­omed,
incredibly narrow waisted women were shown full length, in full color, wearing the beribboned and bustled fashions of the day.
In her youthful years, grandmother aspired to wearing such fashions. There is evidence of this in a studio photograph of her and my grandfather made in Chicago in 1899 shortly after their wedding there. Handsome and well groomed in a dark suit, an upright collar, and white bow tie, grandfather Joel is seated royally, if somewhat stiffly, in an ornate and throne-like wicker chair, while grandmother, tall and more slender than I ever knew her, stands beside him in an elongated skirt and a pretty shirtwaist, more casual but clearly inspired by the fashion plates.
Joel a n d A l m a L a r s o n , C h i c a g o , 1 8 9 9 . ( C o u r t e s y of John W. L a r s o n .)
Did grandfather sit and grandmother stand because her fashion­able
outfit could be displayed to advantage when viewed full length? I shall never know, but the image is clear. The impression is one of a competent, up-to-date, and conventional couple fully capable of launching and raising a family. That family was all about me now as I sat in the living room poring over grandmother's Chicago albums and scrapbooks.
As I grew older I began to wonder about the significance of many of the photos and other items collected there, for these were not scrapbooks and albums in the ordinary sense but served grandmother as a kind of filing system. There were calling cards and addresses, newspaper clippings, letters from the old country, and the books themselves were discarded account ledgers of the Pullman Company. Since by common agreement the history of the family began in Chicago I believed that if I could disentangle the mysteries behind these mementos I would be able to piece together the story of our family's origins.
There was an oral tradition as well. Most persistent was the story that my grandmother had worked in Chicago as a detective in Marshall Field's department store. This helped to explain the sensitivity to fashion evident in grandmother's wedding picture. In any event, I readily believed the story and imagined her walking about the store, elegant in one of the 1898 fashions, and carrying, hidden somewhere on her person, a little nickel-plated revolver. This revolver was not just an invention of my imagination. When I was barely a teenager, my father made me a present of the gun, but only after he had removed the firing pin with a hammer. I still have this gun somewhere.
Reflecting on the story as an adult, I could not help but wonder as to my grandmother's qualifications for store detective. She was, after all, barely over twenty at the time. Rather than dismiss such a fascinating story as pure fabrication, I have concluded that grand­mother's
bilingual talents, her mastery of English and Swedish, would have made her useful in a department store located in Chicago at a time when it was crowded with recent Swedish immigrants.
It was in Chicago while working as a store detective that Alma met my grandfather Joel Larson, who had come from Sweden some years earlier, in 1892. What I never understood is why the family myth began in Chicago, why it did not reach back to 1892 and before, back to Sweden, to Charles XII, or Gustav Adolf.
The tone of my grandparents' home, except for the basement, was set by my grandmother. It was pre-World War I American, although Swedish American. I knew from our neighbors that all Americans were hyphenated Americans of one kind or another, but my grandmother was more American than most of them. In her home there was no picture of Sweden's reigning King Gustav V, nor do I remember a Swedish flag, and there were very few books in Swedish beyond a Bible or two, some religious tracts, and a Lutheran catechism. There were many books in English, however, popular books accumulated by my aunts during their school days but also more serious volumes, such as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and a series, The Blue and the Gray, a popular history of the Civil War.
No ancestor of mine was in America during the Civil War, but as Sweden faded from the family memory it was replaced by the national memory of the new land. I still have an oval framed picture of the Abraham Lincoln family that hung in my grandparents' home as well as my grandmother's collection of old American flags that had been folded and packed away as they became outdated by the addition of each new star.
Grandfather brought nothing tangible from the old country except a trunk filled with clothes made of homespun wool or linen, clothes that he regarded as city, not country clothes. It would do him an injustice to assume he brought some regional Swedish costume. The trinkets now associated with Swedishness were not to be found in his baggage. To imagine them there would foolishly distort the signifi­cance
of his youthful decision to leave the old country.
My grandparents were both caught up in the spirit of the new age. Its symbol was not the little, brightly painted wooden horse we sometimes see in Swedish-American homes today, but rather the steam engine and the railroad. But I exaggerate. Grandfather did bring something with him. He brought a piece of the homemade bread that his mother, Anna Maria Petersdotter, had given him the day he left his southern Swedish highland home at Tuthult farm, Gullabo parish, in Småland's Kalmar län. The bread was enshrined, during my childhood, in grandmother's curio cabinet.
Grandmother's scrapbooks contained other clues to a Swedish past, letters from Gullabo around the turn of the century to my grandparents in Chicago or, later, in Crystal Falls, Michigan. Since I knew no Swedish it was years before I deciphered them, but I learned that they came from my grandfather's father, Lars Petersson, and from his youngest brother Erik.
A Victorian photo album covered with red velour and mounted with a heavy brass clasp contained brown and yellow photographs of my Swedish great grandparents, oddly dressed, stern looking, stiff, and barely smiling old people. Although the photos confirmed our Swedish origins I could not imagine what these odd looking people had been like. Without someone to tell me about the Swedish past, there was no way that I, as a child, could follow the chain of circumstances back in time and space from Saint Paul of the 1920s to rural Sweden of the late nineteenth century. Sweden remained inaccessible, a world apart, less real to me than stories of the boy George Washington cutting down the cherry tree.
Grandfather never romanticized the old country. He never spoke of it in my presence and never expressed a desire to return. But I do not mean to imply that his coming to America had cost him nothing. The great price he had to pay, I believe, was in the loss of his language, of the opportunity to communicate in the language of his youth. The first eighteen years of his life remained packed up and stored away, like the bit of Swedish bread in grandmother's curio cabinet, with no opportunity of bringing it back to life in the language that had formed him.
As an adult I learned of scholarly efforts to understand emigration and immigration in terms of the "push" factors, usually economic ones from the old country, and the "pull" factors, also economic, of the new. Certainly Joel expected to improve his lot in America, but he never said this nor did he ever explain why he left Sweden. Perhaps Joel's going to America in 1892 was simply the thing to do, a family tradition. Three brothers, Swen, Per August, and Karl, and a sister, Mia Matilda, preceded him there, while an uncle, his mother's brother Erik Petersson, who had been to America once before, accompanied Joel on his voyage. His younger brother Erik followed Joel to America a few years later. One could almost assume that Joel left home for no better reason than having what Swedes have called "America fever."
Having "America fever" did not protect Joel from the shock that he must have experienced upon his arrival in the new land. If his journey was typical, he was shuttled along with a flock of others, hardly aware of what was happening, by ship from Gothenburg on Sweden's western coast to England, across England by rail to Liverpool, across the Atlantic rather quickly, if uncomfortably, by steamship to New York and from there, it is my belief, he took the train to Crystal Falls in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where his brother Karl Elof and sister Mia Matilda were already living. Crystal Falls, it turns out, and not Chicago was the scene of the Larson family's first encounters with life in the new world.
Joel may have arrived at Crystal Falls early enough in the summer of 1892 to find work in the mines thereabouts, or he may have worked that first winter felling trees in the woods, but by early spring he would have been laid off as the country entered the major economic depression that began in 1893. He probably left Crystal Falls early in 1893 in the company of his sister Mia and her Norwe­gian
husband Edwin Steve, a butcher or grocer by trade, when they moved to Chicago. Later that summer Joel traveled west looking for work along with a Norwegian friend, and near Horton, Kansas, the two of them found a Swedish community and work in the wheat harvest.
Joel a n d h i s N o r w e g i a n f r i e n d , H o r t o n , K a n s a s , 1 8 9 3 . ( C o u r t e s y of John W. L a r s o n . )
From this Kansas episode there survives a heart moving picture of Joel and his Norwegian friend. It is moving because of Joel's startled expression, his stiffness before the camera, the disproportion-ate size of his hands and feet, which give him the look of a half grown youngster, and his evident yet unsuccessful effort by means of a hat and a watch chain dangled across his vest to appear a grownup man of the world.
Six years would elapse between Joel's Kansas photo and the wedding portrait of Joel and Alma. Joel occupies a similar sitting position in both pictures, yet, in the intervening years, Joel had grown into the handsome and apparently self confident man he appears to have aspired to previously. The Swedish country boy cries out from every feature of the Kansas photo. The urbane young man in the Chicago photo appears to have left Sweden behind him. In fact, we know little of the intervening years except that Joel spent much of this time in Chicago.
According to stories my father told, Joel got to know the Chicago of the 1890s and its Swede Town on the near north side as a young bachelor living in a boarding house operated by his sister Mia. She was a large, gregarious, and strong willed woman. Mia was not easily shocked and could hold her own in a masculine world. While she bullied her husband and rode close herd on her two daughters, she did not interfere with her brother Joel. He was a paying guest and allowed to go his own way.
On Saturday nights Joel did something that no Småland peasant could have done at home. He and his cronies dressed up, donned high top hats, and put on Prince Albert coats. At the rear these coats had long tails with inside pockets concealing flat, pint bottles of whiskey. So outfitted they set out for the Federal Government's breakwaters and piers that stretched far out into Lake Michigan. This was a lawless area, beyond the jurisdiction of the Chicago police, and the scene of unbridled revelry, and high jinx. A milder remnant of the spirit of these bachelor expeditions lingered on during my childhood in the all male gatherings around the furnace in my grandparents' basement.
Joel and Alma met at Mia's boarding house. Their marriage put an end to Joel's Saturday night expeditions to the Government piers and gave him something to write home to Sweden about. His letter telling about his marriage has been lost, but the reply of 11 December 1899 written by Erik, Joel's youngest brother, found its way into one of grandmother's scrapbooks. Erik was 22, the only child left at home and still living with his parents at the Tuthult farm. More time and care may have been given to his education than to those of his older brothers. Erik's letter is good humored and mildly teasing. The brothers appear to have been on good terms. Letters from Joel have become so rare, Erik wrote, that at Tuthult they thought he must have gone to Alaska to take part in the Klondike gold rush. Instead, they were pleased to learn that he had gotten married. "That," Erik wrote, "is an Alaska of quite a different sort." No need for Joel to be concerned about what their parents thought, Erik said. They approved of his getting married and anyway, in Erik's opinion, "it is good that one does that one thinks best in such matters." Erik confided that, now that Joel is married, he will be giving marriage some thought himself. He hopes that Joel will keep in touch. "Now that you're married perhaps we will get a letter twice, instead of barely once, a year."
Erik closed, at his father's request, with lines for Joel from a church hymn. Old Lars Petersson was deeply religious, a pietist and a lay preacher. In his letter Lars repeatedly admonished his children in America to cling to their faith. This may have been a source of embarrassment to Joel for, in America, he would have nothing to do with religion. Once, when my father was about 14, a Lutheran pastor called at the house on Jessamine Avenue to induce him to take instruction prior to confirmation. My father, in connivance with my grandfather, hid out in the basement and was never confirmed. Back in Sweden, confirmation had been mandatory but in America, framtidslandet (the land of the future), one was free to do as one pleased in this regard.
Joel looked to the future, but to what extent, I have often wondered, was Joel really Americanized during these Chicago years? He certainly learned English by the time he married, but I doubt that he had any schooling in this country or truly learned to write the language. I possess a few examples of his handwriting, all extremely brief. One appears in Alma's "Memory" album and is dated September 1898. At first reading it appears to record a curious sentiment for a young man who was probably already courting my grandmother. It reads, as written, "A Fiend in need . . is a Fiend in deed." If Joel really knew sufficient English to know how funny this mangled quotation was, I would be impressed by his sense of humor. Had he really meant "a friend in need is a friend indeed," I would be less impressed but inclined to wonder which of the two, grandmother or grandfather, was the friend in need.
"A friend in need" leads me to the central mystery of the Chicago years. Once, as she appeared over me while I was leafing through her Chicago scrapbooks, I looked up to ask, "Why, grandmother, did you go to Chicago in the first place?" "That," she answered firmly and without hesitation, "is another story." Neither then nor ever later did she respond to this question, neither to me, nor, so far as I know, to anyone else.
My father's sister Marinda, my Aunt Rina, was the youngest of four children and the only one of her generation to take an early interest in matters pertaining to our family's history. She was able to provide a few details when I began my own efforts to unravel the family's mysteries. Although a genial person, and close enough to me in age to tease me when I was young and to be a friend when I was older, she was an unreliable source when it came to family history. For example, she once revealed to me in all seriousness that she had discovered that grandpa Larson descended from a family of the Swedish nobility. It was a harmless notion, a not uncommon fantasy, and easily dismissed. But in the matter of grandmother's reason for going to Chicago, she offered more troubling news.
Aunt Rina explained to me that she had learned from a brother of my grandmother's, Uncle Ernie, that Alma had married in Saint Paul and had gone to Chicago to get a divorce. If she could convince the family of this it would have greatly lightened the load of criticism she sensed my father harbored against her for her many husbands. I was suspicious, but Aunt Rina had given me something to ponder.
Some years ago I paid a visit to Uncle Ernie. He was over 90 and though totally blind lived alone in a small house on Saint Paul's west side. I shall never forget the visit. While we were there Ernie's son William, my father's cousin, arrived. He looked out for the old man and tended his garden. We talked for a long while and I discovered, and later confirmed in the 1900 census records, that Uncle Ernie had lived with my grandparents for a time while they were in Chicago. If anyone still knew why Alma went to Chicago, it had to be Uncle Ernie.
While I questioned Uncle Ernie about Alma's going to Chicago, we stood with his son on the little porch at the back door. Instead of answering my questions, Uncle Ernie, who had been a farmer, looked out with his unseeing eyes over the small patch of corn in his garden. "You've been neglecting my corn," he admonished his son. My queries about Alma were lost in the father and son debate that followed.
Divorce, I have learned, was not uncommon in Chicago during the 1890s, but I finally dismissed Rina's story of grandmother's previous marriage as highly unlikely. Too many people would have known about it. I came to realize that a more pressing reason for secrecy than marriage and divorce might have been Alma's discovery that she was pregnant. Had she gone to Chicago to have, or perhaps abort, the baby? Was she the "friend in need" that Joel had in mind?
Not many years ago I made a pilgrimage to Chicago to seek out relatives of my grandfather and look for answers to some puzzling family questions. I found a retired schoolteacher, LeVerne Larson, who told me many stories about her grandfather Swen, Joel Larson's brother, her father Elmer Larson, and about her own youth in Chicago. She also told be a story about a mysterious figure in their Swedish Mission Covenant church, who had been pointed out to her by her father as a relative. In what way he was related her father would or could not say, and she was not allowed to talk to the man herself. Did LeVerne tell me all she knew? Could my father have had a half brother? The thought would have shocked him beyond belief.
Joel and Alma did not affiliate with a church in Chicago, but they did join a lodge, the "Maccabees." The Maccabees was a Detroit-based fraternal organization with perhaps 200,000 members. It was organized broadly into "Knights" and "Ladies of the Maccabees" with regional "tents" and local "hives." Its activities sometimes included ceremonial hocus-pocus, ritual, and pageantry. Its program revolved around a fantasy world that had little or nothing to do with the Maccabees of the Old Testament or any other identifiable tradition, but it had its practical side as well.
The Maccabees provided members an opportunity to believe themselves socially better off than they might otherwise have been. The men addressed one another as "Knights," the women as "Ladies." Joel, however, had too much common sense to become deeply involved. His primary Americanization took place not in the lodge, but rather in the give and take of the world of work. In Chicago he was employed as a janitor in the Pullman Building, an experience guaranteed to dispel notions of grandeur.
Alma, however, found a home in the "Ladies of the Maccabees." Some forty years later she was still an active member. The Maccabees absorbed the time and energy that she might otherwise have put into church activities. In an age, and of a class that limited opportunities for married women, the Maccabees provided Alma a world apart where she could employ her energies and exercise her talents. During the 1930s, the Maccabees was her consuming passion. As record keeper and dues collector of the Maccabees' June Hive in Saint Paul, she was even able to earn a small income of her own.
In my childhood, the Chicago of 1899 was the place and time of Joel's and Alma's marriage, of the beginning of their life together. It was, I now realize, also a time when decisions were made, decisions that would set my grandparents' course through the decades ahead. Joining the Maccabees was one such decision. The lodge's fabricated tradition was neutral. It had no ethnic stigma, was American, and a step away from Swedishness. To me, during my childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, my grandparents seemed totally American. Still, they were Americans with a subtle Swedish difference, a difference that lay buried in their past and one that, only now, I am beginning to understand.

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JOEL AND ALMA,
SWEDIS
H GRANDPARENTS JOHN W. LARSON
My earliest memories of my Swedish grandparents are somewhat confused impressions of the adult merry making that always took place at their home over the Christmas and New Year holidays. We not only celebrated such occasions with Joel and Alma, who lived in a big white house on a double lot at the north end of Saint Paul, but we were there almost every weekend. Since I was not simply an only child, but also an only grandchild, I now sense that I occupied an odd yet privileged position in the adult gatherings that took place in my grandparents' home.
I joined in when the men—my grandfather Joel, a steam-fitter in the Great Northern Railroad shops at Dale Street and Minnehaha, Uncle Art, a molder by trade, and my father Walter, who was a master machinist—gathered around the furnace in the basement talking, while drinking moonshine and home brew. Such men were the rock bed of their industrial era. They enjoyed the distinctive independence, security, and satisfaction of highly skilled workers. They felt superior to the untrained and unskilled but saved their contempt for their social superiors, office workers, salesmen, and middle management. Awe and respect were reserved for the tycoons, the giants of their industrial age, men like James J. Hill and Henry Ford.
I enjoyed the masculine atmosphere in the basement, near the furnace, the coal bin, the work bench, the stored jars of tomatoes and other preserves, with the damp smell of brewer's yeast and malt, the pungent odor of Copenhagen snuff, and the talk. The men chose the larger topics for conversation, politics and the economy, or the trade unions. Their political perspective was Farmer-Labor, midwest­ern—
not revolutionary but leaning toward socialism. After 1929 their talk turned to the bad times, and after 1932 to Roosevelt, whose various programs for ending or softening the depression, the WPA, PWA, NRA, and all the rest, provided topics for endless conversation.
The men folk in my family never said how they really voted. Subject as they were to pressure from their unions, from employers, and from the more politically zealous among their friends and neighbors, they valued the protection afforded by the secret ballot. Nevertheless in 1933, when I was 10, I remember that while we walked up the long Jackson Street hill on our way home from town my father explained to me why it would be desirable for the government to own the nation's railroads and such major natural resources as coal and iron. I suspect that he voted for the socialist Norman Thomas in 1932, but I shall never know. On the other hand, what I do know is that by the time he died in 1984 he was a card carrying Reagan Republican.
My father's progression from left wing socialism in the early 1930s to right wing republicanism in the 1980s was partly the result of broader social and economic changes. It was also an expression of his upward mobility and a change in his life style. The shift became noticeable in the 1950s when the men no longer gathered in the basement to drink whiskey with one another but my father drank martinis with my mother and their friends before dinner.
During my childhood older customs prevailed. Men and women had worlds of their own. While the men gathered in the basement, upstairs in the brightly lit kitchen the women good-humoredly dismissed this "man talk" as "building the railroads." The men are in the basement "building the railroads" they would say, implying that it was gratuitous chatter without any deeper significance because, after all, the railroads had already been built. The women, my grandmother Alma, my mother Vivian, and an aunt or two, would talk about things closer to home than politics or the economy, preferably about people they knew and how they were faring.
When I got tired of the grownup talk in the basement and kitchen, I would turn to a quiet and inexhaustible alternative, my grand­mother's
rich collection of scrap and photo albums stored to the capacity of a tall oak cabinet on which stood the telephone—tele­phones
"stood" in those days. My favorites were the scrapbooks that my grandmother had pasted together while in Chicago from 1898 to 1901. In my earliest years I looked at the pictures simply for them­selves—
colorful ads of all kinds. But the most eye catching were the fashion illustrations from 1898 wherein statuesque and solid bos­omed,
incredibly narrow waisted women were shown full length, in full color, wearing the beribboned and bustled fashions of the day.
In her youthful years, grandmother aspired to wearing such fashions. There is evidence of this in a studio photograph of her and my grandfather made in Chicago in 1899 shortly after their wedding there. Handsome and well groomed in a dark suit, an upright collar, and white bow tie, grandfather Joel is seated royally, if somewhat stiffly, in an ornate and throne-like wicker chair, while grandmother, tall and more slender than I ever knew her, stands beside him in an elongated skirt and a pretty shirtwaist, more casual but clearly inspired by the fashion plates.
Joel a n d A l m a L a r s o n , C h i c a g o , 1 8 9 9 . ( C o u r t e s y of John W. L a r s o n .)
Did grandfather sit and grandmother stand because her fashion­able
outfit could be displayed to advantage when viewed full length? I shall never know, but the image is clear. The impression is one of a competent, up-to-date, and conventional couple fully capable of launching and raising a family. That family was all about me now as I sat in the living room poring over grandmother's Chicago albums and scrapbooks.
As I grew older I began to wonder about the significance of many of the photos and other items collected there, for these were not scrapbooks and albums in the ordinary sense but served grandmother as a kind of filing system. There were calling cards and addresses, newspaper clippings, letters from the old country, and the books themselves were discarded account ledgers of the Pullman Company. Since by common agreement the history of the family began in Chicago I believed that if I could disentangle the mysteries behind these mementos I would be able to piece together the story of our family's origins.
There was an oral tradition as well. Most persistent was the story that my grandmother had worked in Chicago as a detective in Marshall Field's department store. This helped to explain the sensitivity to fashion evident in grandmother's wedding picture. In any event, I readily believed the story and imagined her walking about the store, elegant in one of the 1898 fashions, and carrying, hidden somewhere on her person, a little nickel-plated revolver. This revolver was not just an invention of my imagination. When I was barely a teenager, my father made me a present of the gun, but only after he had removed the firing pin with a hammer. I still have this gun somewhere.
Reflecting on the story as an adult, I could not help but wonder as to my grandmother's qualifications for store detective. She was, after all, barely over twenty at the time. Rather than dismiss such a fascinating story as pure fabrication, I have concluded that grand­mother's
bilingual talents, her mastery of English and Swedish, would have made her useful in a department store located in Chicago at a time when it was crowded with recent Swedish immigrants.
It was in Chicago while working as a store detective that Alma met my grandfather Joel Larson, who had come from Sweden some years earlier, in 1892. What I never understood is why the family myth began in Chicago, why it did not reach back to 1892 and before, back to Sweden, to Charles XII, or Gustav Adolf.
The tone of my grandparents' home, except for the basement, was set by my grandmother. It was pre-World War I American, although Swedish American. I knew from our neighbors that all Americans were hyphenated Americans of one kind or another, but my grandmother was more American than most of them. In her home there was no picture of Sweden's reigning King Gustav V, nor do I remember a Swedish flag, and there were very few books in Swedish beyond a Bible or two, some religious tracts, and a Lutheran catechism. There were many books in English, however, popular books accumulated by my aunts during their school days but also more serious volumes, such as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and a series, The Blue and the Gray, a popular history of the Civil War.
No ancestor of mine was in America during the Civil War, but as Sweden faded from the family memory it was replaced by the national memory of the new land. I still have an oval framed picture of the Abraham Lincoln family that hung in my grandparents' home as well as my grandmother's collection of old American flags that had been folded and packed away as they became outdated by the addition of each new star.
Grandfather brought nothing tangible from the old country except a trunk filled with clothes made of homespun wool or linen, clothes that he regarded as city, not country clothes. It would do him an injustice to assume he brought some regional Swedish costume. The trinkets now associated with Swedishness were not to be found in his baggage. To imagine them there would foolishly distort the signifi­cance
of his youthful decision to leave the old country.
My grandparents were both caught up in the spirit of the new age. Its symbol was not the little, brightly painted wooden horse we sometimes see in Swedish-American homes today, but rather the steam engine and the railroad. But I exaggerate. Grandfather did bring something with him. He brought a piece of the homemade bread that his mother, Anna Maria Petersdotter, had given him the day he left his southern Swedish highland home at Tuthult farm, Gullabo parish, in Småland's Kalmar län. The bread was enshrined, during my childhood, in grandmother's curio cabinet.
Grandmother's scrapbooks contained other clues to a Swedish past, letters from Gullabo around the turn of the century to my grandparents in Chicago or, later, in Crystal Falls, Michigan. Since I knew no Swedish it was years before I deciphered them, but I learned that they came from my grandfather's father, Lars Petersson, and from his youngest brother Erik.
A Victorian photo album covered with red velour and mounted with a heavy brass clasp contained brown and yellow photographs of my Swedish great grandparents, oddly dressed, stern looking, stiff, and barely smiling old people. Although the photos confirmed our Swedish origins I could not imagine what these odd looking people had been like. Without someone to tell me about the Swedish past, there was no way that I, as a child, could follow the chain of circumstances back in time and space from Saint Paul of the 1920s to rural Sweden of the late nineteenth century. Sweden remained inaccessible, a world apart, less real to me than stories of the boy George Washington cutting down the cherry tree.
Grandfather never romanticized the old country. He never spoke of it in my presence and never expressed a desire to return. But I do not mean to imply that his coming to America had cost him nothing. The great price he had to pay, I believe, was in the loss of his language, of the opportunity to communicate in the language of his youth. The first eighteen years of his life remained packed up and stored away, like the bit of Swedish bread in grandmother's curio cabinet, with no opportunity of bringing it back to life in the language that had formed him.
As an adult I learned of scholarly efforts to understand emigration and immigration in terms of the "push" factors, usually economic ones from the old country, and the "pull" factors, also economic, of the new. Certainly Joel expected to improve his lot in America, but he never said this nor did he ever explain why he left Sweden. Perhaps Joel's going to America in 1892 was simply the thing to do, a family tradition. Three brothers, Swen, Per August, and Karl, and a sister, Mia Matilda, preceded him there, while an uncle, his mother's brother Erik Petersson, who had been to America once before, accompanied Joel on his voyage. His younger brother Erik followed Joel to America a few years later. One could almost assume that Joel left home for no better reason than having what Swedes have called "America fever."
Having "America fever" did not protect Joel from the shock that he must have experienced upon his arrival in the new land. If his journey was typical, he was shuttled along with a flock of others, hardly aware of what was happening, by ship from Gothenburg on Sweden's western coast to England, across England by rail to Liverpool, across the Atlantic rather quickly, if uncomfortably, by steamship to New York and from there, it is my belief, he took the train to Crystal Falls in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where his brother Karl Elof and sister Mia Matilda were already living. Crystal Falls, it turns out, and not Chicago was the scene of the Larson family's first encounters with life in the new world.
Joel may have arrived at Crystal Falls early enough in the summer of 1892 to find work in the mines thereabouts, or he may have worked that first winter felling trees in the woods, but by early spring he would have been laid off as the country entered the major economic depression that began in 1893. He probably left Crystal Falls early in 1893 in the company of his sister Mia and her Norwe­gian
husband Edwin Steve, a butcher or grocer by trade, when they moved to Chicago. Later that summer Joel traveled west looking for work along with a Norwegian friend, and near Horton, Kansas, the two of them found a Swedish community and work in the wheat harvest.
Joel a n d h i s N o r w e g i a n f r i e n d , H o r t o n , K a n s a s , 1 8 9 3 . ( C o u r t e s y of John W. L a r s o n . )
From this Kansas episode there survives a heart moving picture of Joel and his Norwegian friend. It is moving because of Joel's startled expression, his stiffness before the camera, the disproportion-ate size of his hands and feet, which give him the look of a half grown youngster, and his evident yet unsuccessful effort by means of a hat and a watch chain dangled across his vest to appear a grownup man of the world.
Six years would elapse between Joel's Kansas photo and the wedding portrait of Joel and Alma. Joel occupies a similar sitting position in both pictures, yet, in the intervening years, Joel had grown into the handsome and apparently self confident man he appears to have aspired to previously. The Swedish country boy cries out from every feature of the Kansas photo. The urbane young man in the Chicago photo appears to have left Sweden behind him. In fact, we know little of the intervening years except that Joel spent much of this time in Chicago.
According to stories my father told, Joel got to know the Chicago of the 1890s and its Swede Town on the near north side as a young bachelor living in a boarding house operated by his sister Mia. She was a large, gregarious, and strong willed woman. Mia was not easily shocked and could hold her own in a masculine world. While she bullied her husband and rode close herd on her two daughters, she did not interfere with her brother Joel. He was a paying guest and allowed to go his own way.
On Saturday nights Joel did something that no Småland peasant could have done at home. He and his cronies dressed up, donned high top hats, and put on Prince Albert coats. At the rear these coats had long tails with inside pockets concealing flat, pint bottles of whiskey. So outfitted they set out for the Federal Government's breakwaters and piers that stretched far out into Lake Michigan. This was a lawless area, beyond the jurisdiction of the Chicago police, and the scene of unbridled revelry, and high jinx. A milder remnant of the spirit of these bachelor expeditions lingered on during my childhood in the all male gatherings around the furnace in my grandparents' basement.
Joel and Alma met at Mia's boarding house. Their marriage put an end to Joel's Saturday night expeditions to the Government piers and gave him something to write home to Sweden about. His letter telling about his marriage has been lost, but the reply of 11 December 1899 written by Erik, Joel's youngest brother, found its way into one of grandmother's scrapbooks. Erik was 22, the only child left at home and still living with his parents at the Tuthult farm. More time and care may have been given to his education than to those of his older brothers. Erik's letter is good humored and mildly teasing. The brothers appear to have been on good terms. Letters from Joel have become so rare, Erik wrote, that at Tuthult they thought he must have gone to Alaska to take part in the Klondike gold rush. Instead, they were pleased to learn that he had gotten married. "That," Erik wrote, "is an Alaska of quite a different sort." No need for Joel to be concerned about what their parents thought, Erik said. They approved of his getting married and anyway, in Erik's opinion, "it is good that one does that one thinks best in such matters." Erik confided that, now that Joel is married, he will be giving marriage some thought himself. He hopes that Joel will keep in touch. "Now that you're married perhaps we will get a letter twice, instead of barely once, a year."
Erik closed, at his father's request, with lines for Joel from a church hymn. Old Lars Petersson was deeply religious, a pietist and a lay preacher. In his letter Lars repeatedly admonished his children in America to cling to their faith. This may have been a source of embarrassment to Joel for, in America, he would have nothing to do with religion. Once, when my father was about 14, a Lutheran pastor called at the house on Jessamine Avenue to induce him to take instruction prior to confirmation. My father, in connivance with my grandfather, hid out in the basement and was never confirmed. Back in Sweden, confirmation had been mandatory but in America, framtidslandet (the land of the future), one was free to do as one pleased in this regard.
Joel looked to the future, but to what extent, I have often wondered, was Joel really Americanized during these Chicago years? He certainly learned English by the time he married, but I doubt that he had any schooling in this country or truly learned to write the language. I possess a few examples of his handwriting, all extremely brief. One appears in Alma's "Memory" album and is dated September 1898. At first reading it appears to record a curious sentiment for a young man who was probably already courting my grandmother. It reads, as written, "A Fiend in need . . is a Fiend in deed." If Joel really knew sufficient English to know how funny this mangled quotation was, I would be impressed by his sense of humor. Had he really meant "a friend in need is a friend indeed," I would be less impressed but inclined to wonder which of the two, grandmother or grandfather, was the friend in need.
"A friend in need" leads me to the central mystery of the Chicago years. Once, as she appeared over me while I was leafing through her Chicago scrapbooks, I looked up to ask, "Why, grandmother, did you go to Chicago in the first place?" "That," she answered firmly and without hesitation, "is another story." Neither then nor ever later did she respond to this question, neither to me, nor, so far as I know, to anyone else.
My father's sister Marinda, my Aunt Rina, was the youngest of four children and the only one of her generation to take an early interest in matters pertaining to our family's history. She was able to provide a few details when I began my own efforts to unravel the family's mysteries. Although a genial person, and close enough to me in age to tease me when I was young and to be a friend when I was older, she was an unreliable source when it came to family history. For example, she once revealed to me in all seriousness that she had discovered that grandpa Larson descended from a family of the Swedish nobility. It was a harmless notion, a not uncommon fantasy, and easily dismissed. But in the matter of grandmother's reason for going to Chicago, she offered more troubling news.
Aunt Rina explained to me that she had learned from a brother of my grandmother's, Uncle Ernie, that Alma had married in Saint Paul and had gone to Chicago to get a divorce. If she could convince the family of this it would have greatly lightened the load of criticism she sensed my father harbored against her for her many husbands. I was suspicious, but Aunt Rina had given me something to ponder.
Some years ago I paid a visit to Uncle Ernie. He was over 90 and though totally blind lived alone in a small house on Saint Paul's west side. I shall never forget the visit. While we were there Ernie's son William, my father's cousin, arrived. He looked out for the old man and tended his garden. We talked for a long while and I discovered, and later confirmed in the 1900 census records, that Uncle Ernie had lived with my grandparents for a time while they were in Chicago. If anyone still knew why Alma went to Chicago, it had to be Uncle Ernie.
While I questioned Uncle Ernie about Alma's going to Chicago, we stood with his son on the little porch at the back door. Instead of answering my questions, Uncle Ernie, who had been a farmer, looked out with his unseeing eyes over the small patch of corn in his garden. "You've been neglecting my corn," he admonished his son. My queries about Alma were lost in the father and son debate that followed.
Divorce, I have learned, was not uncommon in Chicago during the 1890s, but I finally dismissed Rina's story of grandmother's previous marriage as highly unlikely. Too many people would have known about it. I came to realize that a more pressing reason for secrecy than marriage and divorce might have been Alma's discovery that she was pregnant. Had she gone to Chicago to have, or perhaps abort, the baby? Was she the "friend in need" that Joel had in mind?
Not many years ago I made a pilgrimage to Chicago to seek out relatives of my grandfather and look for answers to some puzzling family questions. I found a retired schoolteacher, LeVerne Larson, who told me many stories about her grandfather Swen, Joel Larson's brother, her father Elmer Larson, and about her own youth in Chicago. She also told be a story about a mysterious figure in their Swedish Mission Covenant church, who had been pointed out to her by her father as a relative. In what way he was related her father would or could not say, and she was not allowed to talk to the man herself. Did LeVerne tell me all she knew? Could my father have had a half brother? The thought would have shocked him beyond belief.
Joel and Alma did not affiliate with a church in Chicago, but they did join a lodge, the "Maccabees." The Maccabees was a Detroit-based fraternal organization with perhaps 200,000 members. It was organized broadly into "Knights" and "Ladies of the Maccabees" with regional "tents" and local "hives." Its activities sometimes included ceremonial hocus-pocus, ritual, and pageantry. Its program revolved around a fantasy world that had little or nothing to do with the Maccabees of the Old Testament or any other identifiable tradition, but it had its practical side as well.
The Maccabees provided members an opportunity to believe themselves socially better off than they might otherwise have been. The men addressed one another as "Knights," the women as "Ladies." Joel, however, had too much common sense to become deeply involved. His primary Americanization took place not in the lodge, but rather in the give and take of the world of work. In Chicago he was employed as a janitor in the Pullman Building, an experience guaranteed to dispel notions of grandeur.
Alma, however, found a home in the "Ladies of the Maccabees." Some forty years later she was still an active member. The Maccabees absorbed the time and energy that she might otherwise have put into church activities. In an age, and of a class that limited opportunities for married women, the Maccabees provided Alma a world apart where she could employ her energies and exercise her talents. During the 1930s, the Maccabees was her consuming passion. As record keeper and dues collector of the Maccabees' June Hive in Saint Paul, she was even able to earn a small income of her own.
In my childhood, the Chicago of 1899 was the place and time of Joel's and Alma's marriage, of the beginning of their life together. It was, I now realize, also a time when decisions were made, decisions that would set my grandparents' course through the decades ahead. Joining the Maccabees was one such decision. The lodge's fabricated tradition was neutral. It had no ethnic stigma, was American, and a step away from Swedishness. To me, during my childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, my grandparents seemed totally American. Still, they were Americans with a subtle Swedish difference, a difference that lay buried in their past and one that, only now, I am beginning to understand.